


i'm just going over home

by keep_swinging



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Background Dina/Ellie and Mentions of JJ, Canon Compliant, Canon Continuation, Gen, Mentions of Suicide and Past Violence, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spoilers, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:35:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25104040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keep_swinging/pseuds/keep_swinging
Summary: She leaves the guitar to begin to heal.Healing is a much longer process.
Relationships: Dina/Ellie (The Last of Us)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 102





	i'm just going over home

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys, this is my first dive into this fandom, and only because I wanted to mess around with where the ending left us. I've had one or two ideas about writing something for the first game way back when, but nothing ever came of it, and as much as I understand the ending, I wanted to go deeper with it, and explore Ellie's thoughts for that and then after.
> 
> So major spoilers for that if you haven't finished the game yet, and the only other warnings for this is that there's some mentions of violence and suicide, but nothing graphic. I'd love to hear your thoughts about this, so comments would make my night!

_I know dark clouds will gather 'round me  
I know my way is rough and steep_

The rabbit she catches is munching on some grass when it wanders too close to the trap she set the night before. It's a clean kill, quick and efficient, and she removes it from the trap with practiced ease, the wood she sharpened pulling smoothly from the bunny's matted fur.

The sunlight sinks below the horizon as she skins it over a small fire, the forest settling with it. She eats slowly, barely able to find an appetite even after a few days of nearly nothing, but her body is used to the hunger that gnaws at her insides. She discards what she doesn't eat, her stomach rolling at the thought of finishing it all, and finds herself looking up at the stars.

She feels numb.

She feels numb as she ticks her thumbs, as her fingers twist and catch on each other, inches from the fire that cackles softly, burning through the various branches she had snapped from above. She feels lost as her eyes flicker between each star, from the moon to the darkness that swallows the space around it.

She knows which way to go, knows the carved path that curves around the rest of the forest, or the shortcut that passes by a small lake JJ enjoyed swimming in.

She knows which way is the home she wants to find again, and knows the way back to the house that creaks and is laid bare behind her, abandoned in a field of wheat and empty sheds. (Idly, she wonders where all the sheep have gone, and her stomach twists at the thought of them not making it back to Jackson with Dina, so she stops thinking before she thinks about it too much.)

Worst of all, she thinks as she tilts her head back down and finds an interest in the bare soles of her converse, picking at the frayed laces with torn nails, is that she feels like a stranger in her own skin.

The fire continues to burn – steadily, stubbornly, and Ellie envies how easy it is for it to stay aflame.

The ocean is cold once everything settles around her.

The waves are gentle from where they lap at the shore behind her, and everything is quiet now, after the boat disappears into the horizon. The gunfire had ended sometime during the fight, but she doesn't remember when, or how, or why.

Her heart aches from where it sits heavy in her chest, still beating fast, still amped with adrenaline that won't die down no matter how many deep breaths she takes. It's like every limb, every muscle of her body, was ready for this, was ready to end this – like everything inside of her was ready _but_ her. She's killed far too many over the years, and far too many more in Seattle, and all those times, it wasn't easy, but it sure as hell wasn't hard either.

Holding Abby down, watching the bubbles bloom from the water as she struggled for more air, thrashing and pushing and fighting until the very last moment . . . there was something inside of her that questioned. Something that caused her to pause, and something else that brought him forward.

There was something inside of her that thought of Joel, and his laugh after she told him a pun far too eagerly after a whole day away from him in Jackson. Something inside of her reminded her of his hugs, warm and tight, the scratch of his beard as it brushed against her forehead. The night they tucked Sarah's picture away in a wooden frame, the morning she caught him flirting with the next door neighbor, the afternoon they simply spent in one another's company, just because they could.

She saw him sitting on his porch, playing guitar, his calloused fingers carefully plucking at the sharp strings. His head had lifted when he heard her shoes on the wooden steps, and a small smile had curved his lips once he saw her.

She saw herself in that boy in the boat, the boy Abby had stumbled to as soon as she had fallen from the pole, her hands desperate and gentle as she had gathered him into her arms, wanting to get as far away from the beach as possible, with an urgency Ellie understood far too well.

(Once upon a time somebody had held a scalpel between her and Joel.

Joel had killed them all.)

The way her stomach had turned and twisted as she held a knife to his throat – threatening Abby the same way somebody had with her years ago – she didn't think it would ever sit well with her, or that she would ever be able to forget it. It wasn't her. (It was.)

It was Joel that caused her to let Abby go.

The air is cold too, when she's finally able to gather her strength and stand. She glances out at the distance, at the fog that hangs low across the seabed, beckoning her to follow.

She turns away.

She sees blood when she tries to sleep. Sometimes it rouses her from sleep so violently that she rolls to her knees and begins to dry heave before she's even fully awake, the different shades someone can bleed sticking to her eyelids in terrifying detail.

Sometimes her hands shake, shake so badly she can barely grasp the dirt of the ground, or feel the grass she pulls from it as it curls in-between her fingers.

These are the nights she scrubs at her eyes with her palms until they hurt before she packs what little she has into her bag and snuffs out the fire.

There are a lot of nights where she can't sleep and decides to continue moving instead.

The forest is almost eerily quiet at night, the bugs silently hidden away, the leaves dead without a breeze to wake them. Even the trees that loom above her are still, their branches thick and overreaching and peppered with age.

It rains steadily in Wyoming, but not nearly as much as it does in Seattle which is something Ellie will forever be thankful for, and a part of her wonders how many more storms these trees can weather before they finally fall.

She wonders how much longer she can go before she falls too.

It storms the next day. Ellie can't help but think it's a cruel twist of irony after thinking about storms just the night before, and mutters curses under her breath as she searches for something to take cover under.

She's not foreign to surviving out in the elements, but rain and snow still annoyed her more than any bitter day or sticky-humid afternoon. There's nothing but trees and cliffs smeared with mud around her, and her walk turns into a run as she heads towards the edge of the forest. The clouds that had been circling the sky for a while grumble and groan before a clap of thunder rumbles the very ground she's standing on and the sky opens up.

The rain is heavy, fat droplets that roll down her cheeks and soak through her flannel faster than she likes, and her hands are slick with water as she finally emerges from the tree line, lightning dancing across the dark sky.

She knows there's some scattered sheds out here, part of an old farm that used to produce fruit for Jackson, according to the weathered signs that decorated half the field and that were still plastered to the sides of the shambled buildings, and she darts for the closest one as thunder booms, loud enough to remind her of the sound of the door as it had slammed against the wall.

The fight that had pursued as her gun was knocked from her hands, as other hands, cold and prying, fought back before wrapping around her. Before she was overpowered and slammed to the ground, before she was kicked and held down with no chance of escape.

Blood splattered across the glass, blood pooling on the ground, blood sticking to the side of his head, dented and bleeding and wide and gaping and she calls out for him and he won't stand up he won't fucking stand up and she can see him open an eye when she yells at him but she shouldn't yell at him but what else is she supposed to do when he's all she has left and _he won't fucking stand up_ —

Lightning strikes something nearby, startling her.

She gasps, sucking in rainwater and sputtering as her hands grab at the street, grasping for something to hold onto, but there's nothing but puddles and the scrape of the broken pavement against her fingertips.

She blinks and blinks again until she can see rain instead of blood, and then she shakily climbs to her feet and makes her way towards the closest shed. She reaches for the pistol tucked in the back of her jeans before approaching the hanging door, holding it close as she clicks on her flashlight and heads instead.

The place is as empty as it was the last time she checked it, and the rain batters the small windows as she makes her way to the back of the shed and settles against the rusted wall, watching the door as it rocks back and forth in the rain. The latch was busted, that much she remembers, and as the rain grows more relentless, she grows restless.

Sleep tugs at her eyelids, but every time she closes them she sees Joel, and she's afraid that if she falls asleep to that final image of him, she'll never be able to wake up.

She wants to wake up.

Ellie knows the farm. It's only a few miles out from what used to be her home, so she found herself trudging down here during her hunting trips to check for any stranglers or infected quite often and became familiar with the area because of it. No infected ever wandered out this far, but she never skipped, never wanted to risk Dina or JJ's safety.

The farm feels too empty now, when she has nothing to turn back to but an empty house.

She ditches the shed at the first sight of sunlight.

She can't stand being unable to turn her focus to something else because all she can do is sit in a shed and wait out the rain. She's happy to be moving again, and makes good ground between the abandoned farm and the next stretch of forest as she thinks about Dina and JJ – more than she should.

She remembers dancing and singing, and playing a soft tune on the guitar to keep him from fussing, his lips curving into a giggly smile as he listened from his crib, Dina leaning against the doorframe with a loving smile. Ellie had looked over once she had realized she was listening in, and smiled too, feeling at peace for the first time in a while.

It was a treasured memory, simple, meaningful, everything she loved in one frozen moment in time.

This forest is still flooded with rainwater that sticks to her sneakers, with mud that tries to pull her under every new step forward. The trees here are younger, their branches thin and wiry and easier to break. She snaps a few when she tries to pull them out of her way, and her eyes follow as they hit the ground in a row, one after another.

A part of her wished Tommy had never shown up.

The trauma of it all follows her like a second shadow. It gets worse the longer she stays out in the forest, the longer this few day journey turns into a weeks-long one. But it's her own doubt that stalls her and keeps her in the forest longer, and it's her nightmares that prevent her from sleeping, and the gnawing of her stomach that keeps her from walking too fast.

She hasn't touched her journal in a while and takes to writing in it some nights when the people she's killed haunt her, when their hands reach out for her help and she screams and scatters backwards. She writes their names on one yellowed page, careful with their lettering, shaky with her pencil that's running far too dull.

It doesn't make her feel better, doesn't stop the trauma.

She rips the page out.

The first group of infected she comes across is a few miles out from Jackson, their rotting corpses scrounging around an old development that's been abandoned for as long as Ellie's been in Jackson. She remembers vaguely a story about some people who used to live there, who traded with Tommy and Maria on occasion, but their story had ended when her story began.

She never found out what happened to them, but it isn't hard to guess when she kills three infected in one building and slaughters a forth shifting with groans in what looks to be a child's bedroom. The magnum left on top of a hastily scrawled note in the kitchen informs her of the full story – a suicide pact gone wrong, as they always seemed to do, one person not strong enough to take the life of another, or their own at the very end.

It's the father that couldn't kill himself, or his baby girl.

She holds onto the note for a long time after reading it, her eyes locked on the ink-stained letters, on the sloppy loops of the o's, on the slanted l's and i's. It looks like Joel's handwriting if she stares hard enough. Her stomach twists, and she wonders if he would've been able to pull the trigger.

(He wouldn't have.)

Dying is stupid. She wouldn't come all this way to die, and even if her mind hasn't been right since all of this started, taking her own life was never an option, even on her darkest days. She had something to live for—

The thought stops her.

Did she have something to live for?

Did she still have Dina, and JJ, and somewhere to call home? She had Marlene, Riley, Tess, Joel . . . she had Dina and JJ and a nice life on a farm with sheep and toys and paintings and an old rusted tractor where she could sit with them and watch the sunset. She had an entire life, something good, like she had with Joel before it was disrupted by—

She had a life with Dina and JJ too.

She could say it was Tommy that disrupted it, but she was the one who decided to walk out that door. She was the one who couldn't figure out what was next without getting rid of the one thing that still plagued her, and she knew deep down inside that she would never be able to begin to heal without confronting the one thing holding her back.

It wasn't right for her to leave, she knows, but she felt like she didn't have any other choice.

She wasn't eating, wasn't sleeping, wasn't _healing_ and then Tommy showed up with something that gave her hope for a resolution to all of this. Ellie thought killing Abby would bring her peace, bring her journey to a close. Killing her was never what she needed. But going all that way and seeing her face to face one last time, broken and beaten and not far from how she felt . . .

It was looking at Abby that stopped her.

It was Joel that reminded her what not to be.

Jackson isn't far now.

She can see the bright lights from afar, cutting through the trees and the long grass of the field. Her heart speeds up at the sight of the gate, larger than life and massive from where it sits, protecting an entire civilization. She stands on the edge of the tree line and stares for a while, taking in the people stationed on top, and the sound of the wind as it picks up, signaling the start of another storm.

She exhales.

In and out.

Steady.

They spot her halfway to the gate, raising their guns and yelling for identification. She moves closer and holds up her hands, empty of any weapons, one arm tattooed, the other thinner than it should be. "It's Ellie!" she shouts up at them, her voice hoarse. "It's just me," she repeats, quieter, lowering her arms once she hears the click and clank of the gate screeching open.

Three of them meet her at the gate, faces she knows but doesn't quite remember, and one of them – an older lady with greying hair and a rifle slung over one shoulder – lifts a hand to her arm and asks if she's all right. Ellie nods, wondering how she must look, like a girl destroyed or a woman exhausted, and the older lady asks her if she's bit, injured or anything of the like.

Before she can answer, a voice rumbles across the street.

"Well look what the goddamn cat dragged in," and Tommy's in front of her with a smile that's more crooked than happy to see her. "I heard you left."

"I did," she returns, her words bitter.

Her lips are pulled down and her eyes are filled with sudden anger but that doesn't stop him as he hobbles even closer to her, his one good eye meeting her narrowed ones. "Did you do it?" he whispers to her, as if he doesn't want the others to overhear what he had asked her to do, what she had almost done. "Did you kill her?"

She waits.

She waits until he's antsy on his feet, until his lips are curling into a smile like he already knows what she did, like he knows her – he used to, but she wasn't the only one messed up by Joel's death and it changed Tommy more than any of them realized – but his revenge story is _not_ hers. She will be better. For Dina, for JJ. For herself.

"I let her go," she tells him, firm and watches as his face twists, "because it was the right thing to do." She shoves past him, leaving him sputtering and furious behind her, and doesn't look back as she makes her way home.

(She hopes one day he can start to heal too.)

Joel's house still smells like coffee.

It makes her smile as she enters, leaving her bag at the door. Her pistol is still tucked in her jeans as she takes in the house, dragging her fingers along the counters, squeezing the soft cushion on the back of the couch, making her way back to the framed photo of him and Sarah. She picks it up and smiles at it, something heavy lifting from her heart when she looks at their happy faces.

At least he isn't alone.

She doesn't bother with eating, instead taking a shower a letting the lukewarm water run over her bruised skin until she can't feel the bruises anymore. She makes a cup of coffee for the sake of the memory, definitely not for the taste, and adds as much sugar as she can to make it taste better. She falls asleep on the couch soon after, settled by the knowledge that she is not grieving, but remembering the comfort he brought her.

His house is a pretty good stand-in.

It's hard, extremely hard, waking up alone after the nightmares, after the screams and spatters of blood. She finds herself waking up and reaching for someone who is never there, her fingers grasping empty air. But she is strong, so she endures. She is strong, so she survives.

She doesn't wake up with a yell squeezing at her throat, and her sleep is dreamless, for the most part. It's the door creaking open that wakes her, sends her fingers reaching for the pistol she left on the coffee table, and she bolts upright, gun cocked and aiming.

"Ellie."

Her grip immediately slackens.

The girl in the doorway smiles, tears slipping down her cheeks. She takes another step forward and then another, and another. When Dina finally reaches her and her arms slowly snake around her, falling into her, Ellie hugs her back, her hands clutching at the back of her shirt – and she knows, right then and there, that she's right where she should be.

_She said she'd meet me when I come_


End file.
